Accessible. Approachable. Astonishing.

The anniversary booking left to chance,
the usual late availability websites
yielding nothing within the budget,
we bit the bullet, took what we could get:
a chain hotel near a construction site.
Arc lights; noise. Not to sleep, perchance

to regret not being organised. Sealing
the deal: grubby carpet, walls a cork-
board colour, duvet stained. We opined
the shittiness, then shrugged; opened
our anniversary champagne. The cork
came out in sympathy: scarred the ceiling.

Her Husband, the Poet

He’s like a gannet: he’ll use anything.
The broken dinner set, the overdraft,
an argument. Then he’ll juxtapose it
with the image of a gull’s wing
marking the sky like a surgeon’s knife
over a sea-flecked limb of sandspit.

He knows the difference between
analogy and metaphor. But check
the browsing history when
he finally lets you have the laptop back:
sandspit. Nice image. He Googled it.

The Thought-Crime Fox(after Ted Hughes)

Picture this midday hound-crazed woodland
where the “hulloo” is less John Peel
than smug satisfaction at the hunting ban repealed,
where a streak of red like dried blood

or rust disappears into the treeline. What
follows is fast and bloody: no time for the delicate
imprint of a paw, a nose attuned to the late
spring air; none of that. Instead, the sudden hot

stink of cordite. The forest resounds
to small arms fire and screaming. A fox
in Kevlar, paws clutching a Heckler & Koch.
The dogs scatter. The huntsmen are down.